The three violinists featured on these two discs were all pupils of Carl Flesch (1873-1944), who also taught Szymon Goldberg, Max Rostal and Henryk Szeryng. Ida Haendel (b. 1923) is still, happily, active, but Ginette Neveu (1919-49) and Josef Hassid (1923-50) both died tragically young: Neveu in an air crash (with her pianist brother Jean) and Hassid in hospital, of meningitis following brain surgery. Neveu, of course, had a distinguished career, brief though it was, and left a legacy of recordings which HMV reissued in a four-LP box-set reviewed by me 12 years ago (9/80—nla). Hassid, on the other hand, made only four 78s (three 12-inch, one ten-inch), all devoted to 'lollipops'—short pieces, most of them lasting less than four minutes. They were made in June and November 1940, the year of his London debut, with a recital in the Wigmore Hall and a concert in Queen's Hall (where he had a memory lapse in the Tchaikovsky Concerto), and only months before his mental illness forced him to give up playing for ever.
Five years ago EMI reissued the Hassid recordings on LP and cassette (together with a previously unissued 'test' of Elgar's La capricieuse, made in January 1939 with Ivor Newton, not
Gerald Moore, who was his partner in the 1940 sessions). These were coupled with a collection of seven short pieces recorded by Ruggiero Ricci in Berlin in 1938, when he was 20, but the set did not remain in the catalogue for long, so it is marvellous to have these Hassid recordings back, this time on two CD reissues. The sequence of the individual pieces is different, that on Testament being perhaps slightly more effective (neither the Testament or the Pearl, nor the deleted EMI reissue, preserve the original chronological sequence); the Testament includes the 1939 recording of La capricieuse as a sort of appendix, whereas the Pearl does not. The surface noise of the original 78s is less noticeable in the Testament transfer, but I can detect no significant loss of brilliance in the violin sound. Hassid's playing comes over as wonderfully as ever, his phrasing and expression never lapsing into sentimentality, his sense of timing superb, notably in Sarasate's Zapateado, where he outclasses even Heifetz.
The factor deciding which disc to get (if one does not want to duplicate Hassid) must therefore be the coupling. The seven short pieces forming Neveu's group on the Testament release were, apart from the Violin Sonata by Richard Strauss, the only works that she recorded before the Second World War: six with Bruno Seidler-Winkler in Berlin in the spring of 1938, the seventh with Gustaf Beck, also in Berlin, a year later (she made the Suk and Chopin again with her brother in London in 1946). There are a few rough patches in the second of the two Suk pieces and in the Tartini, but the playing as a whole has exceptional maturity and authority, and Neveu's performance of the Chopin Nocturne, in particular, is ravishingly beautiful.
The early recordings made by Ida Haendel with Adela Kotowska, Ivor Newton and Noel Mewton-Wood in London for Decca between 1940 and 1942 have their attractive qualities, including an engaging account of the Schubert Sonatina in G minor (despite some rather coy and old-fashioned scoops; there are much bigger ones in the Rosamunde excerpt) and a brave attempt at Ravel's Tzigane. However, I think it would be fair to say that, by comparison with the recordings made by Neveu and Hassid at a similar age, they display formidable violinistic potential rather than established and secure musical and technical authority.
The documentation for the Testament issue is impeccable, and includes a highly informative note by Bryan Crimp; the details supplied by Pearl contain a few inaccurate catalogue numbers and recording dates.'